Chronicles of the Great Books
The startup C.S. Lewis College plans to teach an idiosyncratic curriculum in Massachusetts
The Great Books are coming to Massachusetts.
The C.S. Lewis Foundation, which recently purchased a portion of the Northfield-Mount Hermon campus in central Massachusetts, hopes to open a four-year liberal arts college closely modeled on the idiosyncratic and controversial curriculum taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe and hardly anywhere else. The foundation and the college, set to open in 2012, are named after C.S. Lewis, Christian litterateur-activist, and author of the “Chronicles of Narnia’’ series.
Great books pedagogy traces its roots to pre-World War I Columbia University, and to the pre-World War II University of Chicago. St. John’s has no professors, no academic departments, and almost no lectures. First-year students read Plato, Aeschylus, and Euclid, sometimes in the original Greek, in small class discussions led by “tutors’’ whose specialty may be European history or Romance languages. Easy to get into; hard to stay. St. John’s has one of the highest freshman washout rates in the country because the classics-heavy course load, which looks simple from afar, proves to be quite demanding.
“I have spent quality time at both Annapolis and Santa Fe,’’ says Gayne Anacker, the foundation’s vice president for academic affairs. “We are going to follow the St. John’s model of Socratic pedagogy, which is different from the standard lecture. This is about renewal of the civilization for years and years to come.’’
One oddity of the St. John’s curriculum is its refusal to engage the modern sciences. One could argue that graduating “Johnnies’’ are among the best-educated young men and women in the country. However, it is doubtful that any could score a C-minus on a freshman biology test at a community college. Why? Because they read foundational scientific texts, e.g. Galen, Ptolemy, and William Harvey, instead of studying modern chemistry, biology, and physics.
Anacker defends that. “We will study the real thing, not the latest thing,’’ he told me. “Ever since Copernicus, there haven’t been serious departures from what these folks have said, merely elaborations. It’s stuff that very few college kids study these days.’’
True that!
The Narnia gang - now fund-raising, and filing paperwork with the Commonwealth’s Department of Higher Education - are not the first great bookies with plans to plant their flag in the Bay State. About 60 years ago, the Yale-educated plutocrat-dilettante Paul Mellon, who bailed out of St. John’s because it was too hard, bought a large estate in Stockbridge, intending to transplant the Johnnies from their cramped quarters in Annapolis. It never happened. But this time, it might.
Separately, Dorchester’s own Errol Lincoln Uys tells me he is now “tweeting’’ his epic, James Michener-esque novel, “Brazil.’’ That means you can read his 800-page tome for free, from his website ErrolUys.com, in 140-character bursts, or about 24,000 discrete “tweets.’’ Heck, I’d rather read Ptolemy in the original Egyptian, sorry, Greek. I didn’t attend St. John’s and it shows.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
